Me: “Well, it’s just that you cost loads and I don’t have the money. And, you know, I don’t use you much.”

A900: “But wait, what did I do wrong? You love the Dynax 9, right? That’s why you bought me in the first place! How am I worse than the Dynax 9? Do I take worse pictures?”

Me: “Well, no, but you don’t shoot film…”

A900: “Don’t give me that ‘film’ nonsense, you bought me because you were sick of the quality of image quality from the Dynax 9. Do I or do I not take really great pictures?”

Me: “Yes, you do.”

A900: “Don’t I have a really great viewfinder? Don’t I have all the manual controls that the 9 has? Isn’t my autofocus and everything as good or better? Doesn’t my battery never run out? What have I done wrong here?”

Me: “Well nothing but…”

A900: “I mean I’ve done everything that you wanted. When you got me you said ‘hey this is like the Dynax 9 but even better’. And I was so proud. And then you leave me in that cardboard box all the time and you take all those manual focus film cameras out with you. And you know, that’s fine, because I know I’m a bit heavy, maybe just for special occasions, but you don’t take me then either, you take some heavy film camera then, when you know I’ll take just as good pictures, even better ones. And I won’t run out of film and my metering works too. What’s wrong with my metering?”

A900: “What, are you penniless or something? If you didn’t spend all your money on stupid crap you could pay off that credit card. And it was you that bought me, I didn’t jump into your hands saying ‘pay for me now’. What about the Ricoh GR? You don’t use that much either and that was even more expensive.”

Ricoh GR: click

A900: “See? You don’t care about it do you? It takes great pictures but it’s got no soul, it could be any GR. Why does it have to be me?”

Me: “…”

A900: “I just feel so betrayed. I’ve done nothing wrong. What’s wrong with me? Why are you doing this to me?”

Me: “Okay, look, maybe we can work something out.”

A900: “Oh! So you’re going to take me out tomorrow right? On that photo expedition?”

Me: “Er, well, I already said I was going to shoot film then, and I have some loaded into cameras….”

(pause)

A900: “I’m not saying anything. Did I say anything?”

]]>http://daisychase.net/blog/2014/11/08/conversations-with-my-cameras-1-the-sony-a900/feed/0Interim pencil updatehttp://daisychase.net/blog/2014/05/05/interim-pencil-update/
http://daisychase.net/blog/2014/05/05/interim-pencil-update/#commentsSun, 04 May 2014 23:18:46 +0000http://daisychase.net/blog/?p=815I have ordered a load of new pencils.

Mitsubishi Hi-Uni HB

Faber-Castell 9000 HB & B

Staedtler Mars Lumograph HB & B

Caran d’Ache Technograph HB (these are surprisingly pricey)

and a few literally old-school pencils for comparison – these were the pencils I used at school:

Staedtler Noris Pencil HB

Staedtler Tradition Pencil HB

I will post about them when I receive them.

My general observation so far is that “standard” pencils leave a lighter line than “posh” ones at the same hardness, but still erode at the same rate. I tried some Staedtler WOPEX HB pencils which were inexpensive but pretty much unusable as HB, unless you just wanted to leave a faint ghost impression on the page, or you pressed really absurdly hard on the paper. They’re not available as anything apart from HB, either. I don’t recommend WOPEX pencils. They don’t smell nice either, not being made of wood.

Out of the posh pencils that I have, the Tombow Mono 100 is proving to be the best so far. I have given up on the standard Blackwing – while I do appreciate being able to just drift a writing implement over paper to produce a line, it quite literally goes blunt before I have finished writing a word. The Blackwing 602 with the silver barrel is slightly harder, but it still seems to need more sharpening than the Mono 100, whilst producing a very similar sort of line in darkness/pressure terms.

The Mono 100 is pretty expensive here though, being a Japanese import, so I would be interested in finding a more local equivalent – that’s why I ordered a few of the Staedtler Mars and the Faber-Castell 9000, which are half the price. I’m interested to see whether there’s any practical difference between those and the consumer-grade Staedtlers, though, at HB, which is the grade that school pencils are designed for.

Random additions: I ordered a Mitsubishi Hi-Uni because I saw it on the Cult Pens website while I was looking at pencils. The same goes for the Caran D’Ache Technograph. I have no idea why the latter are so pricey – they’re £2.60 each including VAT.

]]>http://daisychase.net/blog/2014/05/05/interim-pencil-update/feed/0Pencils and the Atlantichttp://daisychase.net/blog/2014/05/01/pencils-and-the-atlantic/
http://daisychase.net/blog/2014/05/01/pencils-and-the-atlantic/#commentsThu, 01 May 2014 21:00:44 +0000http://daisychase.net/blog/?p=807I’ve started on pencils.

There is a specific reason why I started buying, and using pencils. Actually there are a few but the primary one is that I find it very difficult to tell the difference between pencils. With fountain pens, tiny details of the ink and the flow and the writing angle and the grip obsess and distract me while I am trying to write. I even have this problem with ballpoints, which were my next attempt to find something I couldn’t spend all my time messing about with – people find it hard to believe, but there is a lot of difference between a bog standard Bic and, say, a Schneider Slider (my favourite biro – I have a big box of them).

The English don’t romanticise pencils in my experience. For some reason, U.S. commentators seem to be more likely to – not only are there many pencil blogs, but compare the comments on pencils on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk. I picked the top result searching for “pencil”. There are 11 comments on .uk, mostly vaguely positive one-liners like:

Good quality at a good price, couldn’t resist; decent bulk buy for the school, the kids prefer the rubber tipped ones.

These traditional looking pencils work well, they draw nicely and the rubber is useful and hasn’t fallen off. They sharpen well and are useful. They feel OK in the hand.

whereas on .com there are 147 comments, highly opinionated and often running into multiple paragraphs. Just some of the shorter ones:

These pencils are absolute garbage. You can’t even sharpen then without the wood splitting down the middle. If you are lucky enough to get past that, the lead is very weak and breaks off everytime you try and write with it. This is the WORST PENCIL EVER!

This is the absolutely the greatest pencil you can purchase. It writes smoothly and works like a charm. It is easy to sharpen and erase. This pencil is magical.

Sharpen…start to write…break. Sharpen…writes for 1 minute…break. ETC. ETC. ETC. The WHOLE BOX. These pencils are AWFUL. The teachers in the school recommended these…maybe they used to be good…but not anymore.
Unless there is a public statement from Ticonderoga that they made a mistake and have rectified the problem…stay far away.
I never knew I could get so FRUSTRATED by a simple pencil. Guess I have to write in INK from now on.

though this chap probably qualifies for a UK passport:

So yeah. These are pencils. When it comes to pencils, there are really only two things that come to mind: is the eraser good and does it sharpen easily. Fortunately, these pencils are pretty good. The eraser won’t smear your writing and make it illegible, and the pencil is pretty easy to sharpen. So yeah. Pretty decent box of pencils, I’ll probably buy another sometime.

Pencils just aren’t a thing here. The Staedtler ones I linked to are really standard-issue at schools, either those or the black and red “Tradition” ones, but one really isn’t expected to care in the slightest about pencils after early primary school, unless one is an artist or architect or something (and I am not, so can’t speak for gear obsession there). Basically pencils are what children get until they can be trusted with ink. If anything can stop me getting too obsessed with a stationery item for itself, it is this.

I might as well just quickly run down what I thought of these pencils.

Tombow Mono 100 – good quality, light in the hand, for an HB delivers a nice dark line whilst still being hard enough not to need sharpening every word. It looks very ordinary but I can sort of see why people like these.

Palomino Blackwing (black) – lovely smooth lead, needs very little pressure, needs sharpening every word, or in fact halfway through long words. If you don’t mind rotating the pencil constantly, or you don’t mind thick lines a lot of the time, this a great pencil. I’m getting annoyed with it though.

Palomino Blackwing 602 – noticeably harder lead than the standard Blackwing, which was why I bought one after reading American pencil blogs. Actually it still needs sharpening quite a bit but not nearly as much as the Blackwing does. One can actually write a whole sentence.

Field Notes pencil – for some reason I have a pack of these. I don’t know why. I must have got them as a free gift at some point because there is no way I would have bought them. This is my favourite pencil here though because (a) it smells really nice – proper cedar scent (b) it looks really nice – plain wood with simple black printing on it, straight silver ferrule, green eraser, no messing about – and (c) it also writes well – smooth point, dark line but not too soft.

Kimberley 525 – this really quite soft, which is more my fault for buying a 2B. It feels, you know, kind of like a pencil, but the lead is a bit soft for writing. I can’t blame the pencil for this – it’s not like the Blackwing, which says “hey I am a writing pencil look at all my faux-historical references”. I should really get an HB one if I’m going to properly compare and contrast.

Reading back, I’m doomed, aren’t I?

]]>http://daisychase.net/blog/2014/05/01/pencils-and-the-atlantic/feed/0Colour Implosionhttp://daisychase.net/blog/2014/04/23/colour-implosion/
http://daisychase.net/blog/2014/04/23/colour-implosion/#commentsWed, 23 Apr 2014 20:46:17 +0000http://daisychase.net/blog/?p=789A little while ago I was at Silverprint buying some paper and saw rolls of ADOX Colo(u)r Implosion film on the counter. “Imploding Colours! Bursting Red! Toxic Green!” it said on the canister. This is a Lomo film isn’t it? But it was pretty cheap and, you know, why not, so I bought a roll as well as the rest of the junk I was buying.

Researching it on the net, the suggestion is that it was a ruined batch of 800 ISO colour aerial film. People suggested shooting it at between 100 and 400, so when I went to a photography meetup on Easter Monday I thought I’d give that a try – shooting 12 frames at 100, 12 at 200 and 12 at 400. Here are some scans – I’ve messed with levels slightly on some of them, but not changed colours. (Correcting for the green tint isn’t hard but in this situation seems a bit silly.)

EI 100

So this is really green then. And also, at EI 100 (that’s Exposure Index i.e. the ISO that I exposed the film at) pretty over-exposed. And also very grainy.

EI 200

So these are all very green too, and grainier. I suppose there’s a very slight blue cast too.

EI 400

Some red! Not all that bursting though I have to say. Basically still very green and even grainier, to quite ridiculous levels here.

At the end of it all I wasn’t that impressed by this film. I didn’t see any colour shifts between different speeds and it was absurdly grainy at all of them. Like a lot of expired or damaged film, I think it might be best when used to take pictures of one large thing rather than complex crowd scenes like the ones here which rather require detail.

(The camera was a Minolta Dynax 5 with 50mm/f1.7 prime, for the record.)

]]>http://daisychase.net/blog/2014/04/23/colour-implosion/feed/0Water at various speedshttp://daisychase.net/blog/2014/02/03/water-at-various-speeds/
http://daisychase.net/blog/2014/02/03/water-at-various-speeds/#commentsMon, 03 Feb 2014 21:23:44 +0000http://daisychase.net/blog/?p=775I did a little experiment with my Ricoh GR with pictures of moving water at various speeds, which might be of interest and use to people, so hey here are the results. (The pictures were taken at Camden Lock incidentally, and cropped quite significantly as the GR has a 28mm equivalent lens.)

At 1/30, moving droplets are blurred lines, and water in greater volume is a textured sheet. This is about the limit of how low I could handhold the camera while perching on the banks of the canal.

At 1/60, individual drops are more visible but still turn into lines. There are more gaps visible in sheets of water but detail is still lost.

At 1/250 there is a balance. Individual drops are visible if they aren’t moving too quickly perpendicular to the direction of the shot, but they still blur slightly, and if they are moving perpendicular (i.e. across the shot) they’re certainly blurred. The water is still definitely moving but you can see some detail in it.

1/500 is coming close to freezing the water, though there is still a little bit of motion blur in areas that are moving particularly quickly.

And at 1/1000 the water is pretty much still, and blur is due to the limits of the camera.

Which is best? Okay, the answer is always going to be “depends on what you want”, but, some thoughts:

In a landscape photo there’s a lot to be said for freezing the static details of the scene and blurring the moving ones – Ansel Adams did this a lot. The lower speeds achieve this.

The higher speeds are slightly alien. You only see water like this in real life if the scene is lit by a strobe. I would generally use them if I wanted to capture a very deliberate slice of somebody interacting with water drops, and I wanted to emphasise the fact that drops were involved.

For most purposes 1/250 is a good speed for me. People generally don’t move faster than 1/250 unless they’re doing something really quick like sports or martial arts (more so if they’re close), and if I was taking pictures of a scene with people plus moving water I’d get more out of freezing the people in the shot and retaining water movement via motion blur.

]]>http://daisychase.net/blog/2014/02/03/water-at-various-speeds/feed/0My notes from beginning darkroom printinghttp://daisychase.net/blog/2013/12/15/my-notes-from-beginning-darkroom-printing/
http://daisychase.net/blog/2013/12/15/my-notes-from-beginning-darkroom-printing/#commentsSun, 15 Dec 2013 18:25:38 +0000http://daisychase.net/blog/?p=771I’ve recently started learning to print pictures in an actual darkroom. I was a bit concerned that I wasn’t getting the full potential out of film, that I was missing out somewhere. It’s also nice to spend a few hours in a quiet dark room wholly involved in a creative process, and it is creative – the darkroom is where you do your post processing.

It’s slow, or at least I am. In the last session I spent four hours to print three negatives to a point where I was happy with them. At this stage I’m picking things that will challenge me each time – different films and development and lighting conditions – so that I learn, so this will end up being slower than if I was just printing a series of fairly similar shots.

It’s not very expensive though, even if it’s time consuming. I go to a darkroom in a community arts centre (Chats Palace if you’re interested, I can recommend it) and pay a few pounds an hour. The paper isn’t all that expensive. For learning purposes I bought a box of 100 5×7″ sheets of Ilford Multigrade RC Satin – this is a good quality paper that allows for different contrasts, not exhibition quality fibre paper but then you’d not print for an exhibition at 5×7″ anyway unless you were odd. That cost me about £20. At the moment I may use 3-4 sheets to get a print nailed – you need to use paper to test your exposure settings, and they change with each negative – but once you’ve done that you can make as many prints as you like at the same settings.

The technology of it is not difficult to learn. Objectively speaking it is far simpler than Photoshop. That doesn’t mean that it is easy to make good prints, but it means it is much quicker to get to the stage where it is your artistic ability and experience that is the deciding factor, rather than you not knowing where a menu is.

You do learn how forgiving film is in terms of exposure, but also how important lens and film quality is, because you can push the physical limits of the medium when printing. When scanning I’ve found that, while sharp film and a good lens does make a difference, it doesn’t make that much difference as you’re limited mostly by the scanner. This isn’t the case with printing, and the larger you print (including enlarging for a crop on smaller paper) the more you notice. Though even with my staple grainy Kentmere 400 it’s still not bad. I’ll probably buy more T-Max though.

And finally, it’s not something that is digitisable. You’ve made something that exists in the physical world. You may be able to put it in a scanner but at best looking at it on a screen will not be the same as seeing the original. I’m not quite sure what to do about this but it’s novel. I feel like making a zine or something.

]]>http://daisychase.net/blog/2013/12/15/my-notes-from-beginning-darkroom-printing/feed/0Observation about social aspects of shooting filmhttp://daisychase.net/blog/2013/06/08/observation-about-social-aspects-of-shooting-film/
http://daisychase.net/blog/2013/06/08/observation-about-social-aspects-of-shooting-film/#commentsSat, 08 Jun 2013 20:04:57 +0000http://daisychase.net/blog/?p=742I find myself having to defend my position of using1 film cameras a lot less frequently than I used to. When I talk to anyone interested in photography and mention this, they either don’t even mention it, ask some questions about how I afford it2, or say “oh yes I do too”.

Film photography seems to have become acceptable, at least in the circles I have encountered, for the purposes of:

art, and/or

fun

Those are the two aspects of photography that I am most interested in; I don’t know about you.

I’m coming to the conclusion that the only people who really care are on the internet, and thus don’t really exist.

answers: (a) “film’s not that expensive really” (b) “I develop my own B&W film which costs very little to do” (c) “the cameras are cheaper so you save money that way as well” ↩

]]>http://daisychase.net/blog/2013/06/08/observation-about-social-aspects-of-shooting-film/feed/0Rolls and shotshttp://daisychase.net/blog/2013/05/08/rolls-and-shots/
http://daisychase.net/blog/2013/05/08/rolls-and-shots/#commentsWed, 08 May 2013 10:50:09 +0000http://daisychase.net/blog/?p=734One of the features that gets used by both film and digital advocates to promote their argument for their preferred medium is the limitation of the number of shots on a roll.

Digital advocates:

“I can take hundreds of shots in a day on a cheap SD card. Having just 36 on a roll means I might miss something, and I’ll be reluctant to take shots because I’ll be thinking about the price. Plus, I could miss something while reloading, or when the roll comes to an end too early.”

Film advocates:

“Having limited shots on a roll means you don’t just spray them around, you take more time composing and choosing shots and you end up with better results.”

There’s truth in both of these – quite a lot in the digital one, though I wrote it to illustrate some common misconceptions too. Film really isn’t all that expensive, particularly if you develop it yourself, which I do for B&W, and if you scan it yourself, which I do for both. The process doesn’t take that long either.

It also isn’t hard to carry much more film than you will ever ever get through in a day, changing rolls on most cameras is quick, and any sensible person will have a backup pocket camera anyway if they’re that worried about losing something in the seconds changing a roll takes.

(I’m not saying there are no advantages to the digital workflow by any means but capacity is way less significant than people make out.)

On the other hand the common film defence isn’t really true either. Fine, it is good to think before taking shots, but if you get into the habit of not taking shots because of the value of the film you’re as bad as a digital user who takes hundreds of shots of everything because they can.

A lot of the classic (and thus film) street photographers took absurd amounts of pictures. Garry Winogrand took on average several rolls a day the whole of his photographic career – there are anecdotes about him shooting a whole roll while walking less than one block. He shot so much film it wore down the backplate of his Leica. He wasn’t just taking pictures of clouds and fire hydrants and the backs of people’s heads though; every picture he took had a point to it, but he didn’t ever stop himself. (He also took multiple shots if he could, though with street work this isn’t always possible. This is something I’ve heard lots of good photographers say they do.)

So I suppose the conclusions that I’ve come to are:

Shooting more pictures doesn’t mean you get more keepers. It doesn’t work by a ratio. A roll of crap pictures on film will have no more keepers than 500 crap pictures on digital.

You shouldn’t ever stop yourself from taking pictures though, at least not in 35mm. (Okay, if you’re shooting medium or large format you should probably pick and choose more.) Also take more than one if you’re not convinced you nailed it the first time which you probably didn’t.

If in doubt shoot, but it needs to be a reasonable doubt.

(this post originally appeared on Google+ – I should have written it here first though)

]]>http://daisychase.net/blog/2013/05/08/rolls-and-shots/feed/0What is light, anyway?http://daisychase.net/blog/2012/11/08/what-is-light-anyway/
http://daisychase.net/blog/2012/11/08/what-is-light-anyway/#commentsThu, 08 Nov 2012 19:40:42 +0000http://daisychase.net/blog/?p=714light is not perception.]]>I expect that better writers and philosophers than me have explored what it is that photography teaches us about perception. Certainly it is teaching me that light is not perception. First of all, with black and white film, I had to reconcile the difference between what I was seeing with my eyes when taking pictures, and what actually came out in the negatives. It’s hard to recognise how much levels of light really vary in the real world when just looking at things – eyes, after all, are very well suited to looking at things in all levels of light where there is any at all, and also many different levels of illumination in the same scene.

For instance, I am currently indoors in a not terribly well lit bar, but I can easily see everything around me. If I concentrate, I can tell that I have a lower depth of field here than I would in daytime, and that my eyes have to adjust slightly to see things at different distances. But I have to concentrate to notice that. There is probably 1/1000th of the light in here now than there would be outside in full daytime, but that doesn’t matter to me in practice, except if I am taking photographs, when it suddenly matters a great deal.

There is also the issue of colour. Most of the light here is very yellowish, but I adjust for that pretty well – I instinctively know that the menu by the candle is white, not yellow, and that the plant on the other side has green leaves. When there is more light and the difference is more subtle I barely notice the ambient colours. On the other hand, here are two versions of the same shot taken on Elite Chrome 100 in downtown LA recently.

Note that this is slide film, so there aren’t any of the odd issues regarding colour correction that you get with colour negatives. But the uncorrected picture looks very blue. I googled to see whether this was a known issue with the film (several others from LA at the same time have the same) and saw some people saying “yes, shadows are blue with Elite Chrome” but then also others saying “but shadows are blue in natural light – they’re lit by ambient light from the blue sky, not from the sun”. From my memory, the second picture is closer to what I remember, but look at how the white balance correction in the second picture also removes a lot of the blue from the sky, which really have should stayed. And, you know, it was pretty monochrome in the shadows. Perhaps it did look like that and I’m misremembering?

What helps me get past this sort of rumination is remembering that the point of taking photographs is to produce a good picture. Maybe the camera and film will capture colours and light in a way that won’t correspond to what I remember seeing, but that’s okay – what matters is knowing how they will capture the scene given the settings I choose, what sort of results I want, and matching the two together.

]]>http://daisychase.net/blog/2012/11/08/what-is-light-anyway/feed/2More film experiments – C41 colour in B&W chemicalshttp://daisychase.net/blog/2012/08/18/more-film-experiments-c41-colour-in-bw-chemicals/
http://daisychase.net/blog/2012/08/18/more-film-experiments-c41-colour-in-bw-chemicals/#commentsSat, 18 Aug 2012 17:47:43 +0000http://daisychase.net/blog/?p=706Yesterday I developed some cheap ISO200 Agfa colour film from Poundland – unsurprisingly, £1 a roll – in B&W chemicals. I’d heard that this was possible, but reported results varied from “it’s fine but negatives are really dark” to “it’s all grainy and horrible and negatives are really dark”, and detailed instructions were a bit limited.

The summary of my report is that (a) it looks fine, the results are actually surprisingly sharp (b) negatives are really dark due to the orange layer on the film which does… something… but you can compensate for this when scanning (c) it turns the developer orange as well so best not to re-use it.

This is a significant development in terms of film-wasting, because £1 a roll is a lot less than I can get even the cheapest proper B&W film for. I only really use cheap colour negative film for testing cameras because of development costs. A next day service at Snappy Snaps is £2 per roll and, well, the quality is not that great. If I want to take proper pictures in colour, I use Kodak Elitechrome (in 35mm) or Velvia (in 120), both of which I have bricks of in the freezer because I have to send them off and pay more money.

If I can develop cheap colour film as B&W for tuppence ha’penny, though, and get results which are usable to test new cameras and lenses, that’s great – I don’t have to waste proper film – and I do that quite a lot. Or I can just load the colour film into a camera I’m using for random snaps and, at the end, have the option of colour or DIY B&W.

Technical details: I used a 1+19 solution of Ilfotec LC29 for 6m30 at 72F, which is a bit longer/hotter than I’d normally use for most ISO400 B&W rolls e.g. HP5+, but I’d read that contrast could be an issue, so I thought a little longer wouldn’t hurt (also it’s that much longer). I pre-washed the film in water for a few minutes but it didn’t seem to do anything – the water poured out was the same colour as it was going in. Stop and fixer were the same as I normally use – Ilfostop for 30s or so, and Ilford Rapid Fixer for 4m.